ORANGE — Cheers of “Hip, hip, huzzah!” radiated from Butterfield Park Saturday as the Westfield Wheelmen Vintage Base Ball Club and the Orange-Athol Wood Bat League celebrated the end of their exhibition game, lifting their caps to the sky.
The event was a new addition to the third annual Orange Solstice RiverFest’s agenda, and a treat for members of the crowd. Watching the game, which was played using the rules and style of the mid-1880s and mid-1890s, onlookers reminisced about what it was like to watch the Orange Peals play on the same field decades ago.
The Peals were a popular semi-professional baseball team that went defunct due to World War II, though the team tried to make a comeback in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Ken Burrill, 72, of Wolcott, Vt., drove three hours for the game, which reminded him of his late father, also Ken Burrill and a pitcher for the original Orange Peals. He remembers being a little boy, sitting on the sidelines and cheering for his father.
“I was a proud son,” he said. “I was very fortunate to have been a part of that memory.”
Being back on the field after more than 50 years, Ken Burrill said, was “very spiritually uplifting.”
Ken Burrill’s sister, Cindy Burrill, 69, traveled from Keene, N.H., to watch the game with her brother. Cindy Burrill said she couldn’t think of a better tribute to her father, just before Father’s Day.
“My father and all the others would be so honored,” she said. “(The players) were like a family to each other, and here we all are. We’re like a family.”
After the Wheelmen beat the Wood Bat League 7-3, the Peals were officially memorialized with a plaque, which will be placed on Butterfield Park’s grandstand. Audience members who were related to any of the original Peals were invited down onto the field to speak and to point out their relative in an old-fashioned painting of the team. The painting was a replica of one that memorializes the Peals at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.